The introduction of guided weapons on the modern battlefield has permanently altered the character of conventional warfare. Guided weapons have been developed and deployed successfully in a variety of Army, Navy and Air Force applications which include anti-armor and anti-air. Less successfully, guided weapons have been examined for application to active armor and other self-defense roles. The major drawback to current guided weapon systems is cost related, typically ranging into hundreds of thousands of dollars, therefore, their usage on the modern battlefield has been limited.
The DISK concept was initially inspired as a very low cost approach to meet self-defense requirements The primary initial objective was to develop a design with good terminal accuracy (0.1 to 1 meter) and an appropriate response time (1 to 5 seconds), at a unit production cost of no more than a few thousand dollars. High maneuverability was not an initial design objective since the self-defense mission does not require it. However, the emerging design concept exhibited surprising theoretical maneuverability as well, opening up the additional potential for its employment in a number of counter-air applications.
The basic DISK design concept was originally filed Oct. 23, 1990 in commonly owned copending application entitled "Navigation Method for Spinning Body and Projectile Using Same", Ser. No. 07/602,179, on behalf of James C. Harris and is hereby incorporated by reference . This application is an improvement upon the original commonly owned copending Application. The major drawbacks of the original design include that the original design requires the moment of inertia ratio be an integer with an allowable error of +/-10%. The possibility of having a moment of inertia ratio of "1" would require that the DISK be a perfect sphere, a moment of inertia ratio of "2" would require that the DISK device be a ring. A moment of inertia ratio higher than "2" is impossible. Thus, by building to these design restraints it becomes difficult to build practical hardware. Secondly, the original system is based on the theory of discrete proportional navigation. The original design requires the device to complete three full rotations for each maneuver cycle. The first rotation is to acquire the target location, the second is to determine the angle of line-of-sight change and the third is to allow one of the discrete solid propulsion thrusters to correct for the line-of-sight error. The current original method of calculating this error requires a complex electrical circuit or a microcomputer to properly calculate the error. Although this system is complex, it is still operational. However, this application discloses a great and novel improvement upon the original design.